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Nerve-tapping Neckband Allows 'Telepathic' Chat
ZonkerWilliam writes "Newscientist has an interesting article on tapping the nerve impulses going from the brain to the vocal chords, allowing for 'Voiceless' phone calls. "With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerized voice." It's not quite telepathy, but it's pretty close."
Isn't there a reason why DefCon doesn't have wireless mic's at there event?
" It's not quite telepathy, but it's pretty close." I though telepathy was when you could transmit or interpret one's thoughts. These guys are talking about interpreting what one is saying. I am way baked.
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Speaking without moving your lips is generally ventriloquism, not telepathy.
Granted, telling off color jokes with disturbing old man/child connotations doesn't sound quite as cool as reading minds and joining the X-Men. Still, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck without moving its bill, it's still a ventriloquist duck and not a telepath.
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o0t!
"psychics" and televangelists will find a way to work this into their money making schemes.
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Combine this with text-to-speech and wireless headphones, you have an effective non-vocal (and two-way) communication system that doesn't require the use of the hands or the knowledge of surrounding personnel.
The military uses, as well as civilian, are probably limitless. Of course, we're now one step closer to making it impossible to detect cheating on tests, and similar scenarios.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
The computerized voice will ruin it.
Mainly because no one wants to have phonesex with Stephen Hawking.
"hellll-o, you rrrrrrrrrr-eally ta-urrrrrrning meon rightnow."
And then as an answer to that, they'll come out with customized "human sounding" voices and you'll be wanting to shoot all your friends who always call using the American idol flavor of the week voice.
Blind dates will be ruined too... For all you know, that babe-alicious voice on the other end belongs to a 300lb 60 year old with a trechiotomy.
Putting aside the "magic" aspect of telepathy that most SciFi authors seem to strive for, I have often considered how telepathy might look if it were a feature of a real species of creature. What I came up with is surprisingly realistic, though it lacks the charm of SciFi style telepathy.
:-)
The way I see it, telepathy is basically wireless communications. A species that "spoke" telepathically to one another in close proximity could use radio waves to communicate in an omnidirectional fashion. For high enough wavelengths, a nerve center acting as an antenna could be exposed from nearly any location on the body. (Possibly metallic in nature?) By modulating the frequency range used to "speak", a creature could become louder or quieter, effectively maintaining the type of privacy we humans enjoy with a whisper rather than a shout.
Of course, the disadvantage becomes immediately clear. There's no mind-reading involved. No cool body-takeovers, no telekinesis developing, nothing but a simple method of communication that is alien to us, yet accomplishes approximately the same task as human speech.
It's fun to think that "telepathy is the next stage of human evolution", but there are no obvious physics to support the SciFi interpretation of telepathy. (Especially when you get into telekinesis, which requires WAY more energy than the human body can produce!) What physics does allow us is slightly more boring, but none the less an interesting concept to explore.
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Since the device presumably requires contact with a person to use, this should effectively eliminate annoying background noises from public places, busses, etc., and it would also eliminate the echo effect that some headsets have (where you can hear yourself echoed in your own earplug). In fact, using these with normal talking should work just as well so you could reap these benefits without training. Now--if they could make a decent earplug with good volume and sound reproduction, we'd be all set.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Seems like a pretty cool idea, but how are you supposed to interpret letters that come out the same but are fundamentally the same from the beginning? I would think that from the vocal cord stand point many sounds are almost, if not entirely, identical but the lips and mouth movements vary the pitch. How is this device going to tell the difference in those if it is reading the vocal cords?
Closest to ~telepathy~ we'll live to see... cynic. I won't be satisfied until I can actually communicate with my mind alone. Implants into my brain and straps on my neck do not qualify. Teach me to actually send my thoughts unaided! No, dammit, I don't want to use a tinfoil satellite dish! It is not telepathy unless my flesh can actually just broadcast my thoughts. That'll be the day...
/sarcasm
Put down the weed, the dictionary and the Ray Bradbury! Don't dismiss a breakthrough just because it is not 80th century and is tagged as (not literal) telepathy. These guys have worked hard to develop a system that brilliantly answers a big question involving the transformation of thought to the physical world. Lower your cynic shield and watch the wheelchair video (linked in TFA). Have you even known a person with useless or missing legs? Arms? With this they could move about as freely as we "normies" do, utilizing simple vocal gestures. This is a major breakthrough, undeserving of lampooning.
--Not too sure about driving cars though. Or voting. Or intermarriage. Freaks.--
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Quote from Earth: "She took a subvocal input device from its rack and placed the attached sensors on her throat, jaw, and temples. A faint glitter in the display screens meant the machine was already tracking her eyes, noting by curvature of lens and angle of pupil the exact spot on which she focused at any moment.
She didn't have to speak aloud, only intend to. The subvocal read nerve signals, letting her enter words by just beginning to will them. It was much faster than any normal speech input device... and more cantankerous as well. Jen adjusted the sensitivity level so it wouldn't pick up each tiny tremor - a growing problem as her once athletic body turned wiry and inexact with age. Still, she vowed to hold onto this rare skill as long as possible."
Once again Sci Fi pwns reality...
Just because his prior art has prior art doesn't mean it's not prior art.
That's a ridiculous argument. If telepathy is a form of communication, the brain still needs to have an input where it receive the information from the other brain. How is this input different from a "sensory apparatus"? Your definition of telepathy implies its impossibility, and is thus useless.
Or perhaps you consider that a device taping to the cochlear nerve is not part of the brain. Then what if the device was installed inside the cranium, directly connected to neurons, would you call it telepathy now ? If not where is the boundary ?
If you insist that the "brain" in you definition is a non-modified human brain then the question is quickly settled: telepathy doesn't exist. Therefore debating whether something is or is not telepathy is pointless.
.... is more opertunities for people to talk, because frankly the internet has shown my that people mostly talk shit.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
As much as I dislike his oil-from-volcanos and continuous-creation ideas, he did come up with some interesting sci-fi, especially in the area you're talking about. One of his stories, "The Black Cloud", hypothesises beings with immense bandwidth between individuals and discusses at length the impact of bandwidth on individualism and communications. It also suggests the impact of very high-bandwidth communication from such an individual to the human mind (the human mind might initially be taken over but would rapidly fry).
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And, OSC's Speaker For The Dead (1986).
-- John.
Before going near such a device, I want to know how likely I am to slip up and say what I'm thinking instead of just what I want to say. With my actual vocal cords, I still need to open my mouth to stick my foot in it.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
"Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all"?
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
This weekend I saw a similar device at CeBit. It allowed to input text into computer using you eyes only. You would look at on-screen keyboard and the letters to witch your eyes are pointed would be typed in. I seemed very Sci-Fi like ;). After my colleague took a photo of the device, we looked at the photo, and saw two infrared windows. One scanned vertically, other horizontally. It seems that it simply triangulated your eye position. So simple, yet brilliant. It makes computer accessible to people with motor disability.
Jane? Is that you?
Oh Crap, I'm an optimist.....
Walk into high school math class at 9:45, pop quiz says the teacher, reads the questions, pausing for 30 seconds after each one, computer whirring in the corner, at 10:05 the teacher announces "Well, since 6 of you failed today we are going to study xyz"
Once communication is set to bits and bytes things can go a lot faster. At least in some circumstances. Speed dating might get a whole new power setting from this and some vital sign stats.
I can see quite a few things changing radically when you don't have to the have the social clutter of one person talking at a time.
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"Chords" are in music. The structures in the larynx are "cords" as in rope.
Now, for the love of God, can you stop talking so loud on your cell phone at the airport? Nobody cares about your (probably pretend) business conversation and you don't have to talk so f'n LOUD!
> It's not quite telepathy, but it's pretty close.
/. look so 14 year old golly gee whiz?
Jaheezus criminy, must people make
It's absolutely nothing like telepathy. The band is picking up electrical signals in the muscles (called EMG: electromyography) controlling the vocal cords . They can react to reading silently, particularly if you read something "out loud to yourself". If you imagine your own voice while reading something or even imagine speaking, this will happen. It's called subvocalization, and the muscle movements are similar to, but not the same as, speech. That's why the device can differentiate between spoken and "silent" speech. This has been known for decades. Someone has managed to build something that decodes the signals into something like the original words being read or imagined.
There is no transmission of anything, much less thoughts. Although a novel approach, this is simply another human-machine interface. And one that I'll wager will require fairly extensive training for each individual using it, including training it to read them in different physiological states.
The article was worth reporting here without the crap in the last sentence of the summary. I sincerely hope that crap was not what got it approved.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
First, this is still a long way from telepathy.
Second, there seems to be a big problem with latency.
Third, something seems fishy about this demonstration. The timber of your voice, inflection, accent, most of the recognizable aspects involve the movement of air over the vocal chords. Yet somehow, supposedly without air moving across the demonstrators vocal chords, the output sounded just like his speaking voice, including normal dynamic range. That's some computer algorithm! Much, much better than any prior text-to-speech technology available. I mean, if I didn't know better, I would swear that we were merely hearing pre-recorded clips... oh wait... I guess I don't know better.
I wonder if something like this could help Steve Hawking? His brain is still working but the nerves controlling his body have degenerated.